Monday, October 01, 2007

Oh, you're going to ask for more details, aren't you. Shannon Whisnant of North Carolina (is it my imagination or does this state churn out these kinds of stories?) bought the smoker from a storage facility, which was liquidating items left behind when people defaulted on their payments and abandoned their rental lockers. The leg was wrapped in paper and essentially mummified. Whisnant contacted the authorities to make sure there wasn't some SAW-related angle to the whole affair.

Having determined there was no crime involved, Whisnant made the local news rounds, and started charging admission to the smoker.

And now, the weird part.

The leg's previous owner, John Wood, wants it back. He was in a bad plane crash in 2004 and while doctors tried for 8 months to save the leg, ultimately it had to be amputated. Wood determined that he wanted to be buried with it when the time came, so he arranged to have the limb preserved and stored. But he came on hard times, and was unable to afford the $42 dollars a month.

Whisnant doesn't want to give the leg up. The final paragraphs from the Seattle Times article (hat tip to Boing Boing) sum it all up nicely, tieing a beautiful tourniquet around the story.

"He's making a freak show out of it," Wood said. "He wants to go on 'The Tonight Show' and he wants to sell it to the National Enquirer and call Ripley's Believe It Or Not. He wants to put money in his pocket with this thing."

After meeting with a lawyer this weekend, Whisnant decided his best move was to convince Wood to share custody.

"It's a strange incident and Halloween's just around the corner," he said. "The price will be going up if I get the leg."